If you don’t know that Shooter Jennings is a multi-dimensional artist by now, you’re lost somewhere back in 1970’s Outlaw Country. The son of country music legends Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter has made his career diving headfirst into all aspects of the word music. He has done country, sure, but his heart has multiple valves and they all run towards the unique, the interesting, the eclectic and the atmospheric. And his latest exploratory path has led him into straight-ahead, balls-to-the-guitar rock & roll. With rapper artist Yelawolf, the duo has formed Sometimes Y, where Jennings routes his love for synth-soaked nuances and Yelawolf takes his vocal cords on a melody-driven loop, all while the guitars are crunching and the drums are pounding. And Jennings couldn’t be more excited.
“I like dramatic music a lot,” Jennings told me during a 2013 interview for Glide. “Growing up, Nine Inch Nails’ Downward Spiral was a huge record for me. That was probably the record that pushed me to play music because I was really into the way Reznor did records and the fact that he was doing it all himself was really a cool thing to me and inspiring.” He has been following that muse ever since and with his friend Yelawolf, it happened quickly; albeit give or take ten years or so to get tracks finally laid down.
“Shooter and I have been planning on working together for years and when we finally buckled down and made the album, I was like, ‘What the fuck were we waiting on?!,” Yelawolf said upon the release of the first single, “Make Me A Believer,” an in-your-face symbolic song about perseverance. Added Jennings: “The first time Yelawolf and I connected on a track, it was like this fire exploded in my mind. It confirmed my long-held suspicion that there was something really special between the two of us.”
The purists who wished that Shooter would follow in his papa’s career tracks, have been both pleasured and disappointed. Following a few really good country works, notably “Outlaw You” and “The 4th Of July,” Jennings went another way. His Black Ribbons album in late 2009 was a burst of brilliance, anger and deep-thought consciousness wrapped around narrated bits by horror author Stephen King. In 2016, Jennings created Countach, his homage to producer Giorgio Moroder. It was an album that Yelawolf fell in love with and begat their future collaboration.
Jennings hasn’t said goodbye to country music. He has been working with Tanya Tucker recently on their second album together; their first, 2019’s While I’m Livin’, won the Grammy for Best Country Album. He’s also working with Brandi Carlile, playing keyboards in her backing band. Her most recent album, In These Silent Days, is up for multiple Grammys, produced by Jennings and Dave Cobb. “Being in the studio is very natural for me,” Jennings has told me. “The studio is my favorite thing by far. I like touring and stuff but it’s never been my thing like, ‘Oh I just want to get onstage and play for people.’ To me, going in the studio with nothing and coming out with something new and exciting, that’s my favorite thing,” he explained to me for a Songfacts interview in 2016. “I am definitely a studio nerd.”
With all this in his present and future, he hopes to continue making music with Yelawolf and his go-to band, which includes John Schreffler on guitar, Ted Russell Kamp on bass and Jamie Douglass on drums – a powerhouse trio indeed. I spoke with Jennings a few days ago about creating a rock album with Yelawolf, making music with his friends and just being able to be simply Shooter.
Shooter, what made you think that you and Yelawolf, and I know you’re friends, but what made you think that you could make some interesting music together?
You know, it really happened the minute we met. We met in 2010. I was on the road on tour in support of my Black Ribbons record and my nephew Struggle had been telling me about Yelawolf and my friend, Bobby Emmett – he’s a keyboard player who played for Sturgill for many years later but at the time he was playing in my band during the Black Ribbons tour – he was really into Yelawolf. So we had been listening to him a bunch on the bus – it was the Trunk Muzik record – and we particularly loved the musical production. So he and I would be geeking out on that and Struggle was like, “I want you to meet Yelawolf.” And I really wanted to meet him. I was excited.
So we went over to his house and at the time he had kids yelling and we all went to breakfast and then he came to the show. We were in Atlanta and I think what it was, we met on a day off and the next day we had a show and we booked studio time at Tree Sound with a dude named Groove Chambers, who was an engineer, and me and Bobby and Yelawolf went into the studio over there at Tree Sound and actually just fucked around for like two hours or three hours. We weren’t really equipped. I had my guitar and a little tiny amplifier, like a little Marshall that was literally the size of a pencil sharpener, and Bobby was playing the keyboard they had and we just kind of messed around and nothing really came of it. But I really wanted to work with him. There was something about him that I knew back then.
Then he and I would run into each other all the time and then fast-forward to like 2013-ish. I had gotten married to Misty and at the time Misty was the bartender at a bar downtown in Hollywood called the Down & Out, so I would go there sometimes if I had the night off, and just sit at the bar and talk to her and hang out with her. And he was in town and I told him where I was. He came downtown and I remember him rolling up in the bar and we set up a day to go into the studio the next day. Well, the next day I got food poisoning so we didn’t end up going to the studio, where maybe I was just really hungover (laughs); but I remember being very nervous and scared to go in the studio with him, because, again, I didn’t feel like I was equipped, I didn’t know what to do. So there was like a lot of that.
But we hung out a lot. He’d come by the studio when I was recording the Shooter record with Dave Cobb and I was producing the first Brandi Carlile record, and he came by the studio several times; I visited him in the studio when he was producing the record on Struggle and I sang some vocals on that. So we would always hang out in these kind of capacities. Then he posted that he liked a record of mine called Countach. He kind of like flipped out over the record and was like posting all over Instagram and recorded videos of himself dancing to it. I felt good that he liked my music, you know.
So about 2018 or 2019, I went to his Slumerican store that he used to have – it was like a barbershop and a clothing store and tattoo parlor – and I went there and he said to me, “I want to do a record where I sing the whole thing.” And that was kind of what was born of it. We didn’t really know what direction that was going to go. I thought for a minute it might tilt in the country’s direction. Before the pandemic happened we booked April 2020 in the studio to actually make it happen. We had this phone conversation, must have been like February or January of 2020, and started talking about all this music stuff and he started telling me about stuff he loved when he was a kid and we talked about in particular the Legend soundtrack that was by Tangerine Dream and that was a huge moment in the conversation. We had a couple of these talks, you know, and I kind of didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry, I’m just telling you the whole story (laughs).
So I said, let me try and make some tracks, cause that’s how I had done other records in the past, where I’ve made up all the music, or where I was writing music for an artist, like the Marilyn Manson record. So I made two tracks and I sent him the first one – didn’t have any vocals or anything; just a really rough version of a song – and he sent it back and it was “Hole In My Head” and I was like, whoa! I couldn’t believe the melody and the vocals he’d put on this thing. It was like new wave-y and the chorus felt like a summer anthem and I was like, This is crazy good! I freaked out and listened to it like forty times.
Then I sent him another one that was “Rock & Roll Baby,” but he didn’t send anything back. Then we had the pandemic happen and we had to bump the studio to June 1st and once that came around, he showed up and we had ten days. I brought the band and we did those two but then we made the rest of it on the spot altogether. Then he went back and did the vocals and finished writing, filling in lyrical stuff he had to write. And that was how it all happened. It was like, we knew that there was a connection there and the closer and closer we got to it, we started feeling like this could be really amazing and we went there and it just kind of exploded. We did like twenty tracks in ten days and ten of which got narrowed down and by the end of it we knew what the record was going to be.
You said you wrote a lot of this in the studio but did you have pieces that you would give to him?
No, we didn’t have any pieces. I mean, let’s see, the first song, “Sometimes Y,” the beginning of that is Yelawolf playing the synthesizer and he messed around and came up with that thing and then the second half of that song, I had come in the studio a little late one day and John Schreffler had made that up with Yelawolf, like the two of them had made that whole riff and idea and Michael Jackson kind of thing, which was awesome.
“Radio” came from all of us sitting around. Somebody would start something, whether it be Yelawolf coming up with a melody, even just on his mouth, which I can’t do, and that song was built by him doing that first and then the drums and I came up with the synthesizer chords and then we just arranged it. The band would come in and play it down and he’d kind of hum and I’d be like, “Go to the five! Go to the four!” and these guys, we’ve done so many records and so many shows together that we can do that. Kind of like live programming in a way, like instead of drum machines and stuff, you’re actually telling people to do things and we’re all communicating and it works.
In the case of “Moonshiner’s Run,” we didn’t know what to do and he went in there and basically played a whole song with his mouth and said, “I want it to be like this.” And we did it. He basically jibberished that song with a beat in the studio with his mouth and everything, playing the beat with his hands, and we just adapted it into a real song.
Are the lyrics all Yelawolf’s words?
Oh yeah, 100% all his words
Okay, if he’s doing the words where is your rapping at?
(laughs) Oh Lord, no, no, no. I’m not going to rap (laughs). But we knew very quickly that it was going to be a rock & roll record and we just stayed with it.
“Make Me A Believer” is a pretty intense song and the video reflects that with everyone beating on poor Yelawolf.
Yeah, he had the idea for that. He wanted a bunch of people to beat him up (laughs). But I think for him, his words are very artistically, very imagery driven and he has lots of things that he’s cutting in and out of. So I think it means a lot of things to him, and I can’t really speak for him but in a way the song I think represents to Yelawolf, and to us, that we knew people were going to be like, “What is going on with this record?” We knew that we kind of had to win over an audience of our own with this. It was his choice for the first song because of that, because it’s basically us coming out of the gate with this driving rock song and trying to make believers out of all these people that are very confused by what we’re doing.
You know, me and him made a rock record where he sings all the time and people have lots of questions: What do you play? What is Shooter’s involvement in this besides being producer? Well, I’m all over it but until we played live the other night – we did “Make Me A Believer” in Nashville, which was great and it was so cool cause we had never played a show before as a band. And we did that song and I played guitar and John played guitar and normally I play keyboard a lot live but we had Erik Deutsch, who was playing with me, and we got to really do the full sound of the record and it was awesome. It felt like a thing. But that’s what that song means. It’s our battle cry for what we’re trying to do, which is to save rock & roll, I guess (laughs).
“Fucked Up Day” has so many different textures to it. What part of that song came first and how did it build from there?
Wow, that’s actually a good question. I’m pretty sure it came in order. No, that’s not true. I know exactly what came first: the “Fucked up day” bit; John’s sitting behind Yelawolf live playing ding-ding-ding and he was going “Fucked up day.” Then we started experimenting and we did that first part. I know that that came first. Now the middle part, I feel, may have come later when we were figuring out how to link the ending and the beginning. We knew it was going to be like this kind of left turn, right turn, left turn type song and then it was going to end with this massive guitar solo. We kind of knew that was going to happen. But then Yelawolf went in and added the helicopters and all that stuff and made that middle section what it is. So that song in particular was really an effort by him. He went and kind of rechopped it and arranged it so it had a flow that was perfect. Then we put the lead guitar on the end.
Then you have “Catch You On The Other Side,” which is very gentle and not rocked out
Totally and that was just stream of consciousness. Like, I sat down at the piano and just made up those chords on the spot and then he was like, “Okay, that’s the song.” So I basically just sat down and played it and he already had an idea of what he was writing.
Which song would you say took the most time to get right in the studio of these ten songs?
I don’t think that any of them really particularly took long. Like, once we had the idea, it was just executing it. Even something like “Radio,” which is pretty intricate, it was very quick. It all moved so quickly, it’s kind of crazy. I don’t ever get stuck in the studio. If we get stuck on something, we change what we’re doing. If any of them took a long time, we would’ve probably just killed it and moved on and made a new thing.
Was it all done in the studio?
I worked on some other stuff because I had that stuff at my house. Some of it I did in the studio but I knew I didn’t need to waste time doing it there so I did that when I got home. Yelawolf went and recorded all of the vocals. He’d already written it but he went in the studio and layered it all and by the time we both were done, we sent it to David Spreng and he started mixing the record. He’s the engineer I use for everything, my right-hand man, but he’s such a great mixer. I don’t always have him mix records but he makes them great, like Countach and stuff like that, I knew that it needed that sound. So we just sent it all to him and then he started sending mixes back.
You always have these little nuances within your songs. When you’re creating a song, sitting there noodling around, do you hear the little things then or is it afterwards when you have the meat of the song finished?
You know, I would say it’s more of the latter. Sometimes it’s a little thing that got the song started but definitely the nuances come toward the end. Like on “Rock & Roll Baby,” I was messing around and I didn’t want to layer a bunch of synthesizers on it but I wanted to have some like ominous environmental stuff going on. I remembered that when I was on tour with Duff McKagan in Europe in 2019, there was a bunch of times I turned my audio recorder on and recorded these odd sounds and one of them was the train, all of us were riding on that train. So I had that and I just spread that across the keyboard and I started doing the stuff that is all throughout that song and it kind of builds this ominous kind of foreboding sound that’s going on around the bass and everything. Those kinds of things definitely come at the end. Like the claps going on “Radio” and things like that, those kinds of details. We really left the studio with a bare-bones rock & roll album – drums, bass, a couple of guitars, maybe a synth, and definitely a piano. All the extra little frills and stuff, there was a lot more. I cut a lot out. I overdid a lot and then rewound a bunch of it. But that was kind of how it happens most of the time. You get a bunch of ideas out and see what you still like after a day or two, you know.
To you, what is the most poignant line or lyric on this album?
I don’t know, I have an affinity for “Hole In My Head,” the verses on that, because that was the first thing we did. It was such a complex story he was weaving. I was really blown away by it. There’s a part of me that is always going to love that. I love some of the stuff in “Shoe String:” “Manifestation is the coolest thing, the third eye is the tool of aim.” That kind of stuff is just really great. I don’t know if I could pick one. It’d be a little hard cause I’m so proud of the whole project, you know.
What do you see you guys doing next?
Well, we’re going to play shows but we’re not going to go on tour. We’re going to find special things to do. I want to go do a second record. We’re all very excited, we’re on kind of a high together, and I feel like it’s the time to go experiment, cause he already has a plan, he has a title for the second record; that’s how he kind of works. When he gets an idea, I want to run with it; I don’t want to sit and let him get bored with the idea.
You’re talking about playing shows but I thought you were wanting to slow it down a little? [On March 5, Jennings posted on his social media about slowing down the touring part of his life]
Well, I definitely am for myself cause I can’t do this and doing the shows with Brandi, playing piano for her; I can’t do all that and tour my own shit and still produce records. I’m not doing all the Brandi stuff but I’m going to do a lot of it and anything special cause I love her and I love playing with her. But we’re going to do some special things here and there. We can’t NOT play shows with this because it’s too good live. We’ve pulled this off live and it was done live. There’s an importance to that. We want to do festivals, special things with it, you know, but we don’t want to like get on a bus for three months. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want to do that, none of us do. Not only do we have wives and kids and all that, we have projects. I use those guys on tons of records, and with Yelawolf mixed in it becomes Sometimes Y, and those guys are on a lot of records I’ve produced. So we’re just balancing it all. The thing about Sometimes Y, it IS special, it is like that when we all come together so we’re going to treat it as such.
You mentioned Brandi Carlile and what you and Dave Cobb brought out in her – and I mean she is a tremendous artist already – she just bloomed under you guys. What is your chemistry with her?
Brandi and I have a chemistry that is very good and I knew in 2012 that was going to be the case. We did the Tanya Tucker record together, we’re doing this other one right now – I’m going to see them both later tonight – and then I have rehearsal with Brandi for an Elton John Oscar Party or something that we’re playing; I don’t think Elton John is there but it’s a party he throws. So it’s like, life is crazy with Brandi. She’s on a rocket ship, you know what I mean, and she takes me along. Then we come and do these other things together and having done four records with her – the two Tanya’s and two of hers – it’s like we have a groove that’s really good. I want her to always explore new options so I’m not ever going to assume that I’m going to produce her records forever, you know, but I’ll always work with her; whether producing somebody else or I’ll be playing music with her or whatever. She is one of those people I foresee knowing until I’m very old. I love her family and I love her. We just get along really well. She looks to me to tell the truth, because people don’t tell people like her the truth all the time, and I think she trusts me and knows she can, and I trust her, and because of that we make beautiful music together.
How is your mom?
She’s good, she’s doing really good. She doesn’t do shows very often but she’ll sing at little special events here and there, and she writes songs. I want to do a record with her. We have to get a plan. She doesn’t have a whole batch of songs yet. She did a record with Margo Price that hasn’t come out yet. We’ve had a hard time getting a label because every label wants the artist to go on tour and so much more they want out of an artist, and with her it’s just doing the record, you know what I mean.
Shooter, people have always had expectations of who you should or were going to be as an artist. But have you met YOUR expectations of who you wanted to be in your career?
That’s a very thoughtful and kind question and I appreciate that. I’m very happy where I’m at. I feel that where I have landed is where I think I was always meant to be. It allows me to be creative all the time, all year round. And for me, the traveling was wearing on me a lot, and the expectation to give the audience everything they want all the time; I just had so much stuff going on working with all these other artists and kind of doing these magical little things. I don’t know how many I’ll do, I don’t know if people will stop listening to what I do, but at the moment I feel like I’ve found a place where I’m actually getting to be like myself musically fully.
I think that this Yelawolf record has a lot to do with that too but with all the Brandi and the Tanya stuff and all the records and all the cool artists that I’ve worked with over the last three or four or five years, this is what I’m good at. Talking to these people, trying to encourage them to do things that are different or what they want to achieve, I enjoy the relationship part of it and the kind of musicality of it, the constant creativity, it’s certainly a very happy place. I feel like I’m working a little too much at the moment cause I’m at the beginning of this whole thing and you have to work really hard. So I’m just doing a lot of records with a lot of cool artists and doing all this other stuff and trying to balance my kids and having a good family life, and that part’s a little hectic, but it’s going to slow down. But I love what I’m doing.
So it feels good to be you
I feel settled, in a way that I have not felt my whole life, you know what I mean. I feel at peace.
Portrait by Jesse Lirola; live photo by Leslie Michele Derrough
